"Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle; legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent," Hansberry wrote in 1962. "They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps — and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities."

Hansberry was a member of the Communist Party and ran in circles that included black artists, performers and activists including leading intellectuals W.E.B DuBois, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, and [Martin Luther King], which made her a target of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

But that didn't deter her.

"One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world,” she said.

Image Information:

Lorraine Hansberry leans over her typewriter at her Greenwich Village apartment on Bleecker Street during a April 1959 photo shoot for Vogue. Photo by David Attie.